Dust off the doth: Cushman on changing our national athem.

Igrew up in Britain singing God Save the Queen. That isn’t strictly true; in my day we hardly ever sang the national anthem, we were merely required to stand at attention every time it was played. Or at any rate to stand. Even when we did hear the words, we never paid them very close attention. They washed over us, as familiar words generally do. Still, decades later, my generation can at least claim that “Long to reign over us” is a prayer that’s been answered, or a prophecy fulfilled.

That of course is in the first verse. There are others. The second one is a real eye- and- ear opener. Except that it’s never sung. At least, I didn’t think it was. But maybe I was wrong. U. K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to have heard it because he recently, and quite understandably, took serious exception to it. It goes like this: O Lord our God arise Scatter our enemies And make them fall. Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks; On thee our hopes we fix. God save us all. Well, nobody could say that isn’t vigorous. Especially the “knavish tricks” bit. It exposes, more nakedly than usual, the message of all national anthems: we’re the good guys, and God is on our side. They all say that, which should logically mean that they cancel one another out. There’s nothing ironic or metaphorical about them.

I bring up irony and metaphor because Andrew Coyne invokes them, along with “allegory,” in his recent article on the changes to Canada’s anthem. He says, quite rightly, that people can some- times take words too literally, without reference to tone or context. I think he misses, though, the distinction between a conversation and a written text. Or, more to the point, between words used colloquially and words used officially.

So yes: when, to quote his own example, we “happen across a group of girls ad- dressing each other as ‘ you guys,’ ” we don’t stop to wonder if there is some confusion going on. We probably don’t give it a thought. If we do, we’re unlikely to think that the word “guys” has become gender- neutral. We’re likelier to relish the slight incongruity. We may even consider that, once upon a time when it first happened, there was some cheeky humour i nvolved. Humour, though, is not something you go looking for in national anthems, though the world might be a more agreeable place if it were. Whatever the intentions of Robert Stanley Weir, who in 1914 revised the O Canada lyric that he had written in 1908, he wasn’t trying to be funny.

He was trying to be timely, changing his original “thou dost in us command,” which really is gender- neutral, to “all thy sons command,” which really isn’ t. There was a war on, though it was only just getting started, so the words must have been meant less as a celebration of Canadian heroism (which has become the revisionist interpretation) than as an exhortation to it: a musical recruiting- poster, in fact. The soldiers doing the fighting, certainly in the front lines, would have been men. I doubt if anyone back then, hearing the word “sons,” would have formed a mental picture that included daughters. And — despite Coyne’s insistence that this literal-mindedness would have meant that they were deaf to metaphor, irony and allegory — I think they would have been right.

Later generations have probably taken the words as much for granted as I did those of God Save the Queen. But if they do stop to think, they’re as unlikely as their forebears to think that “all our sons” also accommodates “all our daughters.” The word “sons” isn’t in the same class as the word “mankind” which, rightly or wrongly, has been accepted as meaning “all humanity.” “Sons” is a more specific term. It summons individuals. There’s a good case, in this context, for replacing it, especially given that it’s a replacement itself.

I don’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t think anybody’s life is going to be radically changed, for better or worse, either by amending the anthem or by keeping it as it was. And I have to admit that the women in my family are less bothered by the familiar version than the men seem to be. But there’s another reason for amending it — it’s clumsily written. “True patriot love/In all thy sons command.” Is that “command” a noun or a verb? Weir’s earlier version is much clearer: “True patriot love/In us thou dost command.” It’s a verb, with “Canada,” three lines earlier, its subject. He got it right the first time.

All the same: what kind of love is it that has to be commanded? The proposed alteration to “in all of us command” gets rid of the gender issue, but it’s watery, besides being as syntactically ambiguous as the line it replaces. I say, go back to 1908, t hereby appeasing t raditionalists, progressives and pedants alike. Of course the word “dost” may sound a bit dusty, but isn’t that what one wants of an anthem? Weir in 1914 was trying to be up- todate and look where it got us.

LATER GENERATIONS HAVE PROBABLY TAKEN THE WORDS OF O CANADA AS MUCH FOR GRANTED AS I DID THOSE OF GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.